News and views about the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 and other legislation, schemes and policies impacting the Right to Education of India's Children.

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Saturday, March 8, 2014

Noble intentions, ignoble outcomes

"The
road to hell is paved with good intentions," so goes an old saying.
Unfortunately, we are travelling on that road, oblivious to where it
leads.

We have put in place vast number of policies with noble
intentions, that produce exactly the opposite results. The latest
example of this is the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in
Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. The primary
objective of the Act is to protect farmers from predation by the
government and businesses in the course of land acquisition. But it
pushes the protections against acquisitions so far that anyone wishing
to acquire land will first look for land on Mars.

Children of
farmers today aspire to jobs in cities or business of their own. In the
forthcoming years, many of these farmers will be looking for buyers of
their land at decent prices. But with the onerous demands placed on the
buyer by the new Act, they will find few takers. Alongside,
infrastructure building and industrialisation will suffer enormously,
limiting the opportunities for their children. They, their children and
the country will be stuck in a low-income equilibrium.

Sadly, this is not new territory for us — we have been here before. We have done to the labour market
for decades what we are now poised to do to land markets. Cumulative
legislations — more than 50 of them at the Centre and three times that
in the states — aimed at protecting the rights and interests of workers
in the organised sector so terrorise entrepreneurs that few of them dare
operate large-scale enterprises in labour-intensive sectors such as
apparel and assembly activities.

These are precisely the
enterprises that have created vast numbers of well-paid jobs for the
Chinese workers migrating from the countryside to the cities in droves
during the last three decades. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, Indian
entrepreneurs either rush to the safety of the highly capital- or
skilled-labour-intensive sectors such as automobiles, engineering goods
and software, or become invisible in the swath of tiny firms in the
unorganised sector.

The stark result: less than 5% of Indian
workers benefit from the ultra-high protection that labour laws provide
in the organised sector while more than 95% of them toil for a pittance
and without any protection whatsoever in the unorganised sector.

But we refuse to learn from experience and keep adding to our woes. The
Right to Education (RTE) Act of 2009 carries the seeds of undermining
the very right it proposes to guarantee. If the letter of this law had
been enforced, all unrecognised schools, which on average provide better
education than the nearest recognised government school, would have
been shut down as of April 1, 2013, turning the "right" of tens of
millions of children into a curse.

Likewise, if the input norms
in the RTE Act had been fully enforced, a large number of even
government schools would have lost recognition and shut down on April 1,
2013, forcing yet more children on to the street.

The ban on
mandatory board examinations by the RTE Act all the way up to eighth
grade and consequent automatic promotions have eliminated the last
available tool of measuring teacher performance, turning them yet more
complacent. The result has been a rapid collapse of already low levels
of student achievements. NGO Pratham reports that the proportion of
third graders in rural government schools who can identify numbers from 1
to 100 has dropped from 70% in 2010 to 54% in 2012.

Undeterred, we keep piling social goals on what are principally
commercial transactions. When indifference, indeed disdain, towards
economic reforms finally produced an economic disaster, the government
returned to reforms by opening multi-brand retail to foreign investors.

But then it imposed the restriction that the entrants source at least
30% of their goods from local small- and medium-sized enterprises. In
the event, no entry took place with even Walmart, which had knocked hard
on the door for years, choosing to stay out. An embarrassed government
had to later relax the local sourcing condition.

The list of
self-inflicted wounds with noble objectives goes on. Genetically
modified (GM) foods have been in existence in the United States for
nearly two decades. Even the European Union,
which once fiercely opposed these foods, has begun embracing them. Our
own farmers have experienced vast productivity gains from Bt Cotton
seeds permitted since 2003.

Yet, when the Genetic Engineering
Approval Committee, the apex regulatory body under the environment
ministry, gave Bt Brinjal its approval in October 2009, the then
environment minister overruled the decision because he saw in it a
threat to farmers producing the existing brinjal varieties. With the
scientific evidence pointing in exactly the opposite direction, the
decision wound up hurting rather than helping the farmers and has
greatly set back the second technological revolution in seeds after the
Green Revolution.

Policies with good intentions but disastrous
results were the order of the day under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Prime ministers Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee
fought hard to reverse them and the country reaped huge gains in the
2000s. Unfortunately, we have returned to the same old road under the
UPA. Absent another course correction, fires and flames await us.

The writer is professor of Indian political economy at Columbia University.